Microsoft saw more tablets ship with one of its operating systems during Q2 than RIM shipped BlackBerry PlayBooks.
So reveals market watcher Strategy Analytics (SA), which pegged RIM's share of the tablet market at 3.3 per cent, MS' at 4.6 per cent.
No surprises for guessing the top two.
Apple took 61.3 per cent of the tablet …

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Bit of a diff or two there... mostly in that the US/North American smartphone market was led (once) by RIM, with WinMo and Palm close behind. Symbian was pretty low on the scale there anyway. It was when the iPhone and Android sets began selling globally that Nokia began to feel the pain. In the North American market, it's WinMo/Microsoft and Palm that got the sharp drop.

Also, if you think about it, by the time the "Burning Platform" comment came out, Nokia had something like 2-3 years in which to come up with *something* to answer the competition with... and they came out with nothing of any real note.

Yep

Sheer madness, plus calling it a Playbook especially as it is targeted at business types. Sheer stupidity. Big fail. Should have added email and called it something along the lines of WorkPad or whatever

I heard a rumour

Not the web but email

I'm pretty sure you can access the web directly, the issue comes when you want to access your email, you know that thing that blackberry built their business on. To access your email you need a blackberry phone, the phone gets the email and the playbook gets it from the phone. Secure? yes. Needlessly complicated? yes. Possible without owning a blackberry phone? No chance.

Seconded

I had an iPad (sold quickly - hated the thing, far too limited in CODECs, for example), I have an Android tablet and I have a PlayBook. And yes, I even paid for at least one of those.

The PlayBook is a great bit of kit - nice size, swift, great UI (I really like the from-bezel swiping and the lack of a home screen). But the application selection is truly, truly dire - I don't know about waiting for the "run Android apps" engine, but I'd be better off getting out my old Palm III for application support. And the lack of native email is just rubbish... "take two smart devices into the shower? Er, yes, because they're symbiotically joined at the hip". Even then, when you're bridged to a Blackberry, you don't have full functionality - try creating a new appointment and mark it "private", for example.

To me, they've got one shot at a firmware upgrade to make the difference (perhaps linked to the upcoming cellular version), and after that... well, as a device to kick around the kitchen and quickly browse the web, it's great; as a toy to hand the kids to play flash-based games, it works marvellously. But not at that price, though, I'm afraid.

How many Android Tables are the Cheapo Types?

you know the ones that the Likes of ASDA sell fro around a £100.00. The ones with an ancient version of Android, sloooowwww CPU etc. They sell by the truck (or should that be the shopping trolly (with a wobbly wheel)?) load

The ones that compare horribly to the PlayBook, Galaxy Tab and the iPad.

Personally, the 'Play book' name is silly. Unless you are a fan of that Amercian thing they mistakenly call football a 'Play book' won't mean much if anything. That really goes to show RIM's lack of thought when choosing a name that will be relevant outside N. America.

God alone knows

I personally suspect that everyone who, last year, was saying that tablet PCs were a fad, for narcissistic losers, that had no earthly purpose, is now diligently buying up whatever flavour of the New Truth, suits them, in a bid to skew the figures... or something. I'm going to start work on a cross-platform game called 'Angry Geeks': the idea is that you amass armies of squat, fat, white men, and get them to fire insults at each other. Whatdayathink? Will it fly?

Advertising

"Faroe Islands beats San Marino"

So, the second-worst player in the tablet market outsold the worst.

When you stop (misleadingly) treating "Android" as if it was a manufacturer, one thing becomes clear: There isn't a tablet market; there's an iPad market. People buying iPads are not cross-shopping, they're only interested in the Apple offering. At launch of the iPad 2, 65% of buyers already owned an iPhone (30% had owned an iPad 1). That's an incredible crossover, especially considering the huge numbers involved.

Everyone else is selling "a tablet"; Apple are selling "a bigger screen for your favourite apps". The Android tablet marketing is courting the nerds, with spec sheets and CPU speeds, but this isn't a computer, it's a supposed to be a broad market consumer electronics device, and specsheets do not matter here. (Samsung may be a CE company, but the tablets come out of their phones division, not their home entertainment one).

So where are Sony, Philips, Sharp, Panasonic? Tablets are more like TVs than any computer is (and are used in the same setting as TVs), and these companies have the product design talent and economies of scale, brand reputation and distribution to really push the devices into the market.

* with apologies to the Faroe Islanders' football team, who are actually doing quite well these days.

would love to know what those Windows tablets where

Finally, finally

I had an epiphany last night in my quest to become rich and famous.... It's probably stupid and should have occurred to me before.

Background: Always have been paid to work on Windows environments so I tend to use Microsoft products - it happens, you know. However, I also do some unix and linux stuff on my own whenever I get tweaked at Microsoft or think I can do whatever project better/safer with something else (Point-Of-Sale system, decent mailserver, Fire and Forget unix boxen, etc.) Guess what I am trying to say is that being used to Windows (with all the bloat people complain about in an age of cheap as chips storage where it's tough to fill a modern HD on ordinary use), I am used to pulling up whatever tools I happen to need (tracert, ping, basic networking, yada yada) whenever I need to - even my BlackBerry Storm2 has a damn file manager.

This is not the case with Android. I just got an Acer Iconia Tab and I freaking love it! Yeah small, quick, and if I can find a USB->Ethernet dongle (drivers!?!) or some small AP lashup, will replace my current Win7Ultimate HP G62 bidness laptop. But, But, BUT! Everything I need/use has to be downloaded as an app for Android, while not a deal breaker, you would think that basic networking and file tools would be included in a basic install of *any* OS. Is this just me or what?

Essentially, Android is an almost empty toolbox that you have to stock to be able to complete whatever you're working on, whereas Windows is full toolbox (bloat?) that includes that little stupid screwdriver that you may need once in a lifetime. I now understand the real meaning of 'There's an App for that" is not being an obviously cute marketing campaign, you HAVE to have an app for that or it just ain't gonna work. Same difference as a Playbook, except you don't even get email without jumping through hoops (and hardware hoops at that!).